


Smoke on the Water

by MedicalAssisstanceSpareChange



Category: Supernatural
Genre: (surprised that isn't a tag tbh), Fire, Gen, John Winchester's A+ Parenting, Pre-Canon, Rain, Sam Winchester-centric, The Stanford Argument, also fighting there's a lot of fighting like the whole second half is the stanford argument, brief discussion of/references to trauma responses, but they're not discussed in detail, canon-typical discussion of weapons and death, implied/mentioned alcoholism, including: mutism ocd alcoholism and various others, inspired by a tumblr post, probably not quite canon compliant but that's ok the cw doesn't have rights, written by a proud John Winchester Hater
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-14 16:07:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29421354
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MedicalAssisstanceSpareChange/pseuds/MedicalAssisstanceSpareChange
Summary: Sam's major life events, as defined by fire and rain.(Despite the title, not inspired by the Deep Purple song.)
Relationships: Dean Winchester & Sam Winchester, John Winchester & Sam Winchester
Comments: 1
Kudos: 6





	Smoke on the Water

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a tumblr post (https://marymotherof.tumblr.com/post/642873790838308864/i-for-one-think-it-was-raining-when-sam-marched) that took up residence in my head. Got permission to do a fic based on it and it's officially going to have a second chapter! I'm just having writer's block with it and this part stands well alone IMO.
> 
> Thanks for reading, and let me know what you think!

Sam doesn’t have to remember fire to hate it.

Dean once told him that for months after their house burned down, Sammy would start screaming at the slightest smell of smoke. Called him the world’s most reliable smoke detector, said Sam must’ve had the nose of a bloodhound because half the time they didn’t know something was burning until he went off about it. 

Fire took his childhood - his  _ life _ \- away from him. It made his earliest memories ones of a mute brother and a drunken father, it made his formative years into a constant battle with a man who couldn’t take no for an answer, it hardened his edges and roughed up his insides and taught him how to lock himself up like a bunker in an unlivable world. And it  _ was _ unlivable. Untethered, lonely, terrifying and hopeless as they chased down rumor after rumor for one man’s revenge as if a single bucket of water could possibly undo the damage they'd suffered.  


Fire did that to him. To Dean. To them both.

Then fire took his brother, too.

Well, no.  _ John _ took his brother. Took him out to an empty field one day in between motels, left little three-year-old Sammy in the car. Shoved a loaded gun in his hands and pointed at an abandoned car and said  _ show me what you got _ . John as good as gave Dean to the fire that he carried around with him, as far as Sam was concerned.

Sam remembers, fifteen years later, how Dean smelled like gunsmoke and flame when he slid back into the car.

And after that, Dean was gone more. John taught him to fight, to use any weapon he could find and to make up ones when he couldn’t. Dean went on hunts and Sammy stayed behind. The two of them burned bodies and came back smelling like corpses, shot flares at monsters they shouldn’t have known the names of and came back singed, and soon enough the smell of fire never left them no matter how long it had been since they’d hunted, how recently they had cleaned up. Sam would avoid them as much as he could, retreating from their overheated bodies full of fiery adrenaline, but there was nowhere to run in the car or the motel rooms or, heaven forbid, during the hunts themselves.  


He hated it. He hated it, so much. The day Dean came back from his first solo hunt, smoky and shaken, Sam had nearly burst into tears despite being a whole eight years old. He’d clung to his brother and breathed him in deep and tried to find what had once been Dean under the ashes, tried to reconcile the flames with the brother who’d always protected him.

But the fire had taken Dean, like it had taken John and Mary and in some ways Sam. The life they could have had was  _ gone _ .

Still, though, Sam could struggle. Could oppose the fire that burned in his father’s heart, could choose research over bullets, always trying to find a way out of the flaming wreck that was his life. He refused to succumb to the smoke in the air like his father and brother had.

Then came the letter.

The letter had shown up at Bobby’s, because Sam was rather lacking in a permanent mailing address. Bobby had called John, and John had yelled at Sam, and Sam had shouted back. A lot.

Even the thunder outside couldn’t drown out the way they screamed at each other. John called him a coward. Sam said he was his own man. John said he was abandoning his duty, and Sam laughed at that outright, because  _ it’s only duty if you choose it, Dad, and we never had a choice, me and Dean. Your little child soldiers. _

Dean stayed silent, unmoving.

It had gotten uglier. Sam vented eighteen years worth of frustration and anger not just on his own behalf, but on his brother’s. John continued to act holier-than-thou, like he could  _ shame _ Sam into following his orders. Tough luck with that, because Sam wasn’t Dean, wasn’t one for orders and was plenty familiar with shame and how to counter it. Felt it every time he had to transfer into a new school, every time he was mocked for his ratty clothes and haircut, every time he was judged as a product of John’s choices.

John said,  _ you’re betraying your mother, boy,  _ and Sam had been angry enough to say it, to spit it out with a curled-lip sneer and a dismissive tone. 

_ I never knew her, I don’t owe her anything _ .

For a long moment, there’d been nothing but the sound of raindrops.

He broke the silence by hefting his bag onto his shoulder. John roared like the beast Sam had always suspected he was, and Dean finally reacted, almost like he was going to step between them, but when John drew back from where he’d been reaching towards Sam so did he.

_ If you’re leaving, don’t you dare come back _ , John said.

Sam looked him in the eye and smiled and said  _ Bye, Dean _ , and walked out into the storm.

The cold air was refreshing. It washed away the smoke that lingered around him, the scent of John’s drinking and Dean’s obsessive weapon-cleaning, the gunpowder and fire that they’d made into a semblance of a life. The wetness of the asphalt under his sneakers reflected streetlight towards him, a sparkling bridge to a better place. _C_ _ ome, come, be free, be you _ .

The sidewalk was covered with earthworms, out celebrating the weather. Sam grinned and stepped between them, a little dance of sorts, and tilted his face to the sky as he laughed.

The rain was a new start. A baptism, if Sam wanted to be poetic. (And - he did. This once, he wanted to indulge and be poetic, so he did. He was  _ free _ .) The puddles he splashed through became the Red Sea and the little motel room he’d walked away from was Egypt. No longer was he chained to a boulder of a life he didn’t choose, liver pecked out by eagles borne on the wind made from choices he had no say in. The metaphors were many and ridiculous and Sam let himself have them all, infinite as the raindrops, and laughed out his relief and tears and stress. The anger and confusion inside him drowned under the onslaught of the thunderstorm.

He was still grinning when he finally got on a Greyhound the next day, headed to California.


End file.
